


How Many Kisses Do You Need?

by coricomile



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Repo! The Genetic Opera Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26892859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coricomile/pseuds/coricomile
Summary: It's his heart that gives out first. There's something ironic about it.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 14
Kudos: 99





	How Many Kisses Do You Need?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Supernatural Cinema challenge! I had a lot of fun playing in this world. (And also took the title from Devil's Carnival instead, but it felt more thematically appropriate).
> 
> ETA: I am SO ATTACKED by how many of you haven't seen Repo! and feeling super old because of it. It's a classic! Please do yourself a favor and find it on YouTube!

Sam thinks his mother died of poison. Dean thinks she died a saint. John doesn't think much at all outside of work, his _hospital_ job that leaves blood stains on his clothes and his eyes dark and hard and distant and cold. Nothing at all like the image of the man that stands in the front hallway, his smile wide enough that his eyes crinkle at the corners like Dean's do. Sam has seen that image, the glow of the photo screen turning it mostly shades of blue and gray, every day for his entire life. He still can't imagine the man in it is his father. 

John Winchester has a heart of stone, a liver of inorganic material, and the sense of an elephant, whatever that is. Sam hasn't trusted him since he was a toddling three years old, still clinging onto Dean's arm for balance as he shoved himself into the world. John, _father_ , has never forgiven Sam's endless questions, has never said a single truth in all of Sam's life, and Sam despises him for it.

Dean knew long before Sam did. Sam saw it in the way his brother couldn't quite look at either of them when the word _hospital_ was even mentioned, how he flinched every time there were whispers about the repo men anywhere near them. Sam hated them both so much sometimes that he could taste blood. And there's something about the taste of his own blood, salt heavy and thick as a tree trunk and just a little too sweet against Sam's tongue since he started getting the coughs and the blackouts. 

Sam remembers when he used to cry at the drop of the pin. When he was eight, ten, twelve, terrified and lonely and bored and never knowing what days John would be home to see him. Dean always came running, his feet skidding on the fancy carpet like something out of a cartoon, eyes wild every time he burst into the room as Sam got sicker and sicker. Sam had tried to stop crying, hated the terror of Dean just waiting for the final bad thing to happen to him. He never managed to stop totally, but he got better at hiding it. 

John gave him so many IVs over the years that Sam has a constellation of pinprick scars on the inside of his arms. John tests new homebrew pills on him that sometimes make him feel better and sometimes makes him so sleep heavy he can barely do more than drag himself downstairs for a new change of scenery. He balks any time Sam so much as suggests going out, even under Dean's watchful eye. The smog hangs heavy in the sky, sticks in Sam's lungs when he just cracks the window open, but he hasn't been outside in years. He misses being outside more than being healthy. 

He doesn't remember the first wave of the sickness. He'd still been in diapers when the whole world went to shit but Dean remembers some of the before times. If Sam asks, he'll tell stories about the world before the repo men, before kidney failure or a collapsed lung meant endless debt or death, before corpse raiding for the new fad drug was just a thing people just did. He'll curl up around Sam's forever cold body under the covers, rub his big hands over Sam's frozen arms and blow hot air over his curled fingers as he tells fuzzy, probably half true stories. 

The first kiss is pity. Sam doesn't know which one of them is more pathetic, but he hangs on until he can't. 

\---

It's his heart that gives out first. There's something ironic about it. 

He wakes up in the middle of the night breathless, heartbeat racing and vision swimming, ripping at his own skin with numb fingers. He sees the night blacked green of Dean's eyes, feels familiar hands on him hauling him up from his sweat soaked mattress, hears a register in Dean's terrified voice he's never heard before, and then everything stops. 

He wakes up with a new used heart that has a barcode stamped on it and a debt he's too young to even pretend to understand. When he thinks about it, when he's stuck alone with his feelings all twisted up, he wonders if they're even his at all. 

\---

Dean doesn't lay with Sam as much anymore, tends to sit in a chair next to the bed on the bad days instead of crawling in with him. Sam's a skinny sixteen, but whatever's wrong with his insides hasn't stopped him from getting taller, taking over most of the mattress on his own. He always offers to move, to let Dean in, but Dean just shakes his head and rubs his thumb over Sam's pulse, waiting out the coughs and bringing easy to eat food and laying cold water wet towels over Sam's forehead and the small of his back. 

On the good days, when Sam's crawling up with walls with boredom and so full of energy he wants to risk running up and down the halls like a kid, John takes Dean with him. An _internship_ , he'd said the first time. Dean had clenched his jaw, a small thing so easily missed if Sam hadn't been watching him his whole life, before turning heel and following after. 

Sometimes, Sam can smell the blood on him, even under the bleach and antiseptic shower. Those nights, Sam ignores Dean's squirming reluctance and yanks him into bed with him with all his strength until Dean curls up around him again. For having an _internship_ at the _hospital_ , Dean's arms and chest sure have gotten wide with muscle. Sam grabs onto him anyway and tries to scrub away what he can with touch alone. 

He hasn't watched the news feeds for a long time. He doesn't want to see the faces of people John has repoed. That Dean might have repoed. Their sick little family practice bowing down to Rotti Largo and all the people that worship at his feet, trading themselves and their lives for designer organs like it might make them better on the inside where even John and Dean's blades can't touch. 

Sometimes he wonders if he'd have been roped into it if he hadn't gotten sick. Even at six years old, before the coughs and fainting spells set in, Sam had been stubborn. He wouldn't have done it, not if he had the choice. He would have run away first, hidden himself somewhere and dragged Dean with him by the hair if he had to. It's almost funny in a way that makes him want to cry again. He's probably dying but John still has him in a way he wouldn't if he had tried to talk Sam into cutting open bodies for legal profit. 

Repoing changes Dean, shuts down the big grins and giant appetite and his brother's laughter. Sam misses him even when he's right there, misses the stories that were definitely made up and the easy way Dean used to touch him. There's always something under Dean's nails these days and he picks at them constantly, his hands reaching for Sam and pulling away before they land. 

The second kiss is stolen. Dean doesn't sleep well anymore, face scrunched up and body tense, but the lines fade when Sam touches his lips against them. He sighs when Sam kisses him properly. At least Sam thinks it's a proper kiss. He hasn't seen anyone but family in six years. He wouldn't know. 

\---

The third kiss tastes like copper without the sticky sweetness Sam is used to. Dean doesn't bother with the bleach shower, doesn't say the words out loud but stops pretending Sam doesn't know. He staggers in, his GeneCo branded mask still dangling from his fingertips. Sam has spent all day dizzy after a new test pill of John's but he sucks in what breath he can to catch Dean's body against his own. 

"You don't have to do this," Sam says, mouth caught against Dean's on the fourth, fifth, tenth kiss. Dean's lays his hand over Sam's chest, his fingers curling against a scar that has faded but stretched and Sam's stomach turns. 

"I'll kill every last one of them for you," Dean whispers and Sam feels sick and whole at the same time. He wraps his arms around Dean's and holds him up, knees buckling against his weight. He doesn't know what debt John owed before, but he's the cause of Dean's. 

He'll find a way to stop it. Dean can never scrape all the blood off his hands but Sam can stop it from taking him over. He will.

\---

The sixteenth, twentieth, fiftieth kiss is given freely. Sam still alternates between wanting to throw his body into the wall just to feel _something_ and being so weak it takes every last inch of his strength to lift one hand. Dean turns into a nocturnal creature, sleeps during the day and wakes up when all of Sam's energy has been used up. He wears two watches and doesn't hide the pages from Rotti himself anymore. 

"You don't have to do this," Sam says time and time again as Dean pulls on his waterproof black scrub jacket and digs his mask out from the back of the closet. Dean ignores him every time, layers up and tucks knives into pockets and straps and turns into something Sam can't stomach to see. 

The gloves never feel right against his skin, plasticky and cold and impersonal, but he always holds his bare chest out when Dean reaches for the scar. He closes his eyes and takes his kisses- apologies, love, sorrow, _devotion_ \- and stays up until the sun cuts through the smog grimed window and Dean is back where he belongs. 

John shows up once or twice a week with a new colored pill or a new IV bag and promises again and again that he'll find Sam's cure. Sam turns seventeen in two months. He hasn't believed his father in over a decade.

\---

It's almost too easy to lie. Sam is so tired of this house and the broken shade of Dean's eyes and the endless cycle of good-bad-bad-good days. When John gives him his pills, he tucks them under his tongue and mimes swallowing. They sting bitter, dissolving as John says his platitudes and touches Sam's cheek and gives him hugs that are supposed to make up for his forced solitude and abandonment. 

The second John leaves, Sam spits the pills out the window and watches them splatter a hundred feet down onto the cracked and yellowed pavement. He wonders how long it will take his body to shut down, wonders if his used heart will be weakened faster or slower than his old one had. It hadn't been too bad the first time, from what he can remember. He viciously hopes it's John that finds him, knows it will probably be Dean. 

It'll hurt, he thinks as Dean lays kiss seventy on the dip between his collarbones. Seventy-one hits his sternum, seventy-six above his navel. Eighty-two through ninety-one spread across his thighs. It will hurt Dean like a stab wound, stay behind like a lingering burn, but the debt will be gone and he won't have to repo ever again. He can start washing the blood away. 

Sam spits his medicine for a month and gets sick enough that he starts bringing a pillow into the bathroom for all the time he spends in there. Week seven, he doesn't vomit. Week eight, he's full of energy. Week twelve, he feels better than he has in years. Week fourteen, he hasn't coughed once in days. Kiss two hundred and sixteen, the only reason he feels breathless is because Dean's hand is between his thighs. Kiss three hundred, the only reason his secondhand heart beats so hard in his chest he can feel it against his ribs is because Dean is inside of him, their bodies as close as can be without surgery. 

Week twenty, Sam spits his pills in front of Dean and does sixty jumping jacks in a row after. He doesn't even breathe heavy when he's done. Dean's face goes dark and Sam thinks he knows what the repossessed see for the very last seconds of their lives. 

\---

Sam goes outside when John and Dean are both out _at the hospital_. He takes a deep breath of smog and corpse smoke and wind and bites into the inside of his cheek until the skin breaks. His blood doesn't taste sweet anymore. 

\--- 

John is bleeding. Red stains the worn out carpet in Sam and Dean's room, pooling in the places where Sam has worked the fibers into nothing from running himself in circles. Sam's hands are shaking but Dean's are steady. Sam has never seen him hold the scalpel before, but the handle looks natural cradled against Dean's palm, the sharp edge just an extension of his brother's rage. 

"What did you do to me?" Sam asks. He's read thousands of books but John always hid the medical texts. He doesn't know how fast someone can bleed out through cuts to the back of the knees, deep enough to cripple, but he imagines it can't be terribly long. John closes his eyes and rage rises up in Sam so strong he goes lightheaded. "What did you _do_?"

"I'm sorry, Sammy," John whispers. He closes his eyes and Dean's lip twists into a snarl, his knuckles white around his blade. John should be proud, Sam thinks. Dean's everything he ever wanted him to be. "I tried to keep you safe with us. You aren't like your brother. Your mother-"

Sam doesn't learn about his mother. 

He takes his brother to the shower in the basement and scrubs one red off his skin until it turns another shade. Kiss four hundred and fifty makes Sam sneeze with the smell of artificial mint. Kiss five hundred has him shouting the house down before they burn it down. Sam makes them stay too long to watch their old bedroom, his old prison, collapse onto itself as the flames rise. 

His cheap heart isn't paid off. Dean is an asset, second best repo man behind only John. Rotti will be looking for both of them. Sam takes kiss five hundred and five in front of the burning mess of lies and betrayal and Dean takes their father's collection of tools rolled up in a beach towel Sam never got to use. Sam takes a deep breath and his chest doesn't rattle, even with the smoke. 

"I'll kill them all for you," Dean says. Kiss five hundred and nine is tender under Sam's ear. Dean rests his palm over Sam's heartbeat and it doesn't feel like an accusation at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on [Tumblr](http://coricomile.tumblr.com)!


End file.
